Beliefs about the structure and origin of the cosmos held by a tradition or its adherents, as distinct from the cosmology and world-structure subcategory under the doctrine type, which records the same territory once a tradition's authorities have formally systematised it. The line between the two is often a matter of degree rather than kind.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingStatements about the structure and history of the world and its beings - creation, world ages, the shape of the cosmos, the fate of the dead - held as articles of a tradition rather than as speculation. The accounts gathered here answer different questions: an origin of the world and a recurring destruction of it are not the same kind of claim. 2 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 2 Learn More
The Cosmological Beliefs
This group gathers cosmological beliefs, the teachings of the traditions about the structure, origin and destiny of the cosmos: how the world came to be, how it is ordered, and how it will end. Every tradition frames human life within some such account of the whole.
The browser will find the cosmological beliefs the atlas gathers. The entries describe each in its own terms, reporting the tradition's own account rather than reconciling the many differing pictures.
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. CosmologyView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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